Mahmoth's Music 8: The Maiden Imagined
The Imagined Village (Eliza Carthy, Martin Carthy, Billy Bragg, Benjamin Zephaniah, etc, etc.),
Death and The Maiden Retold (Link) and Cold, Hailey Rainy Night (Link), The Imagined Village, 2007
Most of my music tends to come through my father. This is somewhat inevitable, given that I've inherited most of his taste in music (though the Grateful Dead give me trouble, and I'll never share is liking for outsider music and old-style purist's folk), and a good deal of my digital collection comes from the house's swathes of CDs and LPs and bootlegs of various types. Nevertheless, neither of us lives in the past (¬¬) hence stuff like this. Popped up on P.'s radar a few months back, they saw the gig, grabbed the album, played me what turned out to be the worst track on the album (or at least the least awesome), then gave it to me to rip.
Turns out, of course, it's a piece of joy: the central figures of both the New and Old Folk scenes along with a few outsiders grab a swathe of Traditional tunes and stuff them kicking and screaming into THE FUTURE, complete (in the case of the WTOTA mentioned) with the Elfin Man in Tam Lynn being replaced by an Asylum Seeker. ...Yeeeaaah.
Anyway, here we have Sex and Death, and the mildly disturbing mental image of a man running off with a woman's hymen. Here, the updating actually works some, assisted, of course, by an utterly brilliant musical style, with enough of the good old stuff thrown in to remember the originals, mixed with the new stuff, like the first's whispering and the second's thunder. Enjoy.